How reclamation on a deleted volume works

Storage that is no longer in use, needs to be reclaimed by the array. The process of reclaiming storage on an array can be intense on the array. To avoid any impact on regular I/O's to the array, the reclaim operation is made asynchronous. When a volume is deleted the space previously used by the volume is tracked for later asynchronous reclamation. This asynchronous reclamation is handled by vxrelocd (or recovery) daemon.

To perform the reclaim operation during less critical time of the system can be controlled by the following two tunables reclaim_on_delete_wait_period andreclaim_on_delete_start_time.

The default value for these tunables are:

reclaim_on_delete_wait_period=1 
reclaim_on_delete_start_time=22:00

reclaim_on_delete_wait_period

The storage space used by the deleted volume is reclaimed after reclaim_on_delete_wait_period days. The value of the tunable can be anything between -1 to 367. The default is set to 1, that means the volume is deleted the next day. The storage is reclaimed immediately if the value is -1. The storage space is not reclaimed automatically, if the value is greater than 366. It can only be reclaimed manually using vxdisk reclaim command.

reclaim_on_delete_start_time

This tunable specifies the time of the day, the reclaim on the deleted volume is performed. The default time is set to 22:00. This can be changed to any time of the day.

By default, the vxrelocd daemon runs everyday at 22:00 hours and reclaims storage on the deleted volume that are a one day old.

The tunables can be changed using the vxdefault command.